Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel - Hardcover

Viramontes, Helena Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743287665 ISBN 13: 9780743287661

Publisher: Atria Books, 2007

Synopsis

Four young women struggle with violence and poverty in East L.A., including homeless gang member Turtle; Ana, who cares for a mentally ill brother; teen victim of the hard-knock life Ermilia; and missionary's daughter Tranquilina. By the Luis Leal Award-winning author of The Moths. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Helena María Viramontes is the acclaimed author of The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus; and the coeditor of two collections: Chicana (W)Rites: On Word and Film and Chicana Creativity and Criticism. She is the recipient of the 2006 Luis Leal Award and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, and her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and adopted for classroom use and university study. Viramontes lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a professor in the Department of English at Cornell University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

The Zumaya child had walked to Chavela's house barefooted, and the soles of her feet were blackened from the soot of the new pavement. She swung her tar feet under the vinyl chair as she stacked large, empty Ohio Blue Tip matchboxes the old woman had saved for her into a pyramid on the kitchen table. Throughout the house, scraps of paper, Scotch-taped reminders, littered the walls. Cardboard boxes sat nestled like hungry mouths of birds wide open for wrapped tumblers, cutlery, souvenir ashtrays. Bulk-filled pillowcases leaned against the coffee table, tagged by the old woman with words so scratchy they could have been written by the same needle used to pin the notes to the pillowcases: cobijas, one note said; Cosa del baño, said another. No good dreses. Josie's tipewriter. Fotos. The child swung her feet as she stacked sixteen then eight then four then two then one hollow matchbox until the shadows lengthened in the kitchen. Before the lightbulb had to be switched on, before the old woman Chavela ordered, Go home now, listen to me, it's getting late.

Chavela continued packing tin cans from the pantry into a box on a chair opposite the child. The old woman was toothpick-splintery like her writing. Her hands trembled from the onset of Parkinson's. Rhubarbs faded from the print of her housedress. She padded across the kitchen wearing neatly folded-down cotton socks and a pair of terry-cloth slippers. She barely whooshed the air whenever she passed the child.

Are you deaf? It's getting late. Chavela's croaky words floated from a distant place to the child's ears like yanked strands of seaweed beached on the shore. The child held a matchbox in midair and looked at the greenish flame flicker under the iron comal and waited for the old woman to say something else. The chair was hard, lumpy and stuck to the child's thighs. Chavela shook out a cigarette from a cellophane package, propped it between her stitched crunch of lips, grabbed a matchbox and shook it, rattled another, then another in search of matchsticks until she had scattered the pyramid about the table.

Chavela waxed the shiny temples of her forehead with her tobacco-tarnished hand. The child could see the milky film of her eyes scanning around the kitchen in search of matchsticks and finally the old woman said, It's not right, I'm telling you. Chavela raised the flame on the stove and hunched over the spurting fire under the comal. The heat splashed on her face and then she lowered the gas, inhaled and coughed and returned her gold bunched package to the pocket of her rhubarb dress.

The child had dreamt of lizards, and it was because of the dream that she had listened to the smaller Gamboa boy, who had caught a tiny lizard from a mound of bulldozed earth. The earthmovers, Grandmother Zumaya had called them; the bulldozers had started from very far away and slowly arrived on First Street, their muzzles like sharpened metal teeth making way for the freeway. The Gamboa boy had hidden behind her grandfather's toolshed, and psssted at the child to join him. His face tar-smudged, he held it and at first the lizard clawed the thin air. In his other hand, the Gamboa boy held a pair of rusty scissors. He reassured her that the tail would grow back. It's not right, she knew, even if they witnessed a miracle. The lizard turned to stone, stiff and silent. They both waited. He made her touch it and then he made her touch the rings of wrinkled skin. The cold sensation never left her fingers, his clamp around her wrist as he pulled her behind the toolshed never left her, his dirty rough clasp where the lizard's head poked in and out never left her. That feeling -- it's not right -- never left her.

The old woman had taped scribbled instructions all over the walls of the house. Leve massage for Josie. Basura on Wetsday. J work # AN 54389. I need to remember, Chavela had told the child when the child pointed a matchbox at the torn pieces of papers clinging on the walls. Water flours. Pepto Bismo. Chek gas off. It's important to remember my name, my address, where I put my cigarillo down Call Josie. Chavela Luz Ybarra de Cortez. SS#010-56-8336. 4356 East 1st or how the earthquake cracked mi tierra firme, mi país, now as far away as my youth, a big boom-crack. The dogs and gente went crazy from having the earth pulled out right from under them. Cal Mr...Lencho's tio sobre apartment. Shut off luz. The earthquake's rubble of wood and clay and water yielded only what was missing; shoes without shoelaces, flowered curtains without windows, a baby rattle without seeds in its hollow belly, an arm without a body; and how the white smell of burnt flesh choked. J work # AN 54389. Smoke outside. That's why I began to smoke cigarettes, to hide the white smell even over here in El Norte, even after seventy-seven years, so don't complain about my cigarillos.

But Chavela forgot to smoke her cigarettes outside and the tobacco made the child's nose itch. She smoked in front of the kitchen sink where the linoleum floor was scuffed with so many years of standing to scrub metal pots or pour a glass of tap water. The old woman inhaled quietly, and stared out the window at the lawn of her small yard to see the lemon tree that yielded lemons every other year, to memorize the potted ferns hanging from the shanty arbor built by a married man she had once loved. As she exhaled, the cigarette smoke resembled coiled earthworms without the earth, and she studied the shrubs of bursting red hibiscus bushes that bloomed lush and rich as only ancient deep-rooted hibiscus shrubs can do. Chavela squinted to keep the fumes away from her eyes and then rested the cigarette on the cigarette-burnt windowsill where she had rested hundreds of cigarettes or saved little discoveries such as safety pins or loose Blue Chip Stamps or buttons. The old woman returned to her task at hand and placed another cardboard box next to the child. Chavela's shaky fingernails ticked against the cardboard lid like the rooster clock on the wall.

I'm trying to tell you how it feels to have no solid tierra under you. Listen to me! Where could you run? The sound of walls cracking, the ceiling pushed up into a mushroom cloud. Do you need Dräno to clean out those ears of yours?

But the child heard it, a long rip of paper.

It just wasn't right. Nothing was left, I tell you. Nada. I cried for so long that if my grief had been a volcano, it would have torn the earth in two.

The child gazed at her, imagining an egg cracking into two jagged halves.

My tears could wash away mounds of clay, a flood as dark as blindness pouring from my eyes.

The child imagined a river of molasses.

And under all the rubble, under all that swallowed earth, the ruins of the pyramid waited.

The child knew the end of the story and continued stacking the matchboxes. Pay attention, Chavela demanded. Because displacement will always come down to two things: earthquakes or earthmovers. The child stared at Chavela's cigarette smoke coiling as thick and visible as the black fumes of the bulldozer exhaust hovering over the new pavement of First Street.

Now go home! the old woman said abruptly, packing a set of newspaper-wrapped plates in the box. At least you have one.

Saturday morning barely stretched against the skies. The dull gray doused the glow of the yellow porch light. The child lay buried under a heavy fleece blanket imprinted with a lion roaring. Someone had given the orange blanket to Grandmother years before the child came to live with them, and though she tried to be a good girl humming under the weight of the animal heat, the rigidity and the goodness became impossible. She poked her head out, saw morning light, relieved.

She yawned almost as earnest as the lion, and then swallowed a few times to clear the ocean waves in her head. Her hearing sometimes reached and sometimes connected or sometimes didn't connect to the waves of sea. Fever-sweaty, she wrestled one leg then the other from beneath the tight hot compress of the blanket until she was free to jump on the lion's incisors. The springs of the mattress squeaked and the headboard bounced and the pillows spilled to the floor and then Grandfather's thundering threat, Renata will get you! followed from the next room and she froze.

For weeks he had engaged the child's attention with the story of Renata Valenzuela, a local schoolgirl who had vanished, abducted one afternoon. Grandfather once pointed to a derelict house claiming it belonged to Renata's parents to show the child what could happen if she was bad. The neglected grass burnt to coarse pricks under the carnage of dead leaves heaped everywhere. The windows were draped in straggly black curtains. Tongues of paint curled from the rotted wooden door and whispered to the child of horrific grief.

At night the child refused to succumb to the long harrowing blankness and fought sleep in order to keep at bay the menacing Renata. Finally, the morning light arrived entirely, inviting. Her feet itched to walk against the cold hardwood floor and she slid off the bed and began to tiptoe to the window. She kicked aside a pillow and stubbed a toe on the doll that Mrs. M. of the Child Services gave her last Christmas. At the window, the child puttied her hot cheek against the rain-cool glass. On the other side of First Street, Chavela's blue house looked as empty as a toothless mouth.

The rows of vacant houses were missing things. Without hinged doors, the doorframes invited games. Shattered windows had been used as targets. Chavela never would have allowed her yard to weed wild, never allowed cans of trash to be scattered by the street dogs or left to the crows who pecked at coffee grinds and cucumber peelings. The earthmovers, parked next to the row of empty houses, were covered in canvas tarps and roped with tight-fisted knots to protect the meters, ignitions and knobs on the dashboards from the weekend rainstorms. Already the child viewed the two Gamboa boys sawing a butcher knife through the thic...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0743287665
• ISBN 13: 9780743287661
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336